think native

I used to promote a club night, and as part of our marketing, we’d get tshirts printed up, usually to be wrapped tightly around a lithe young PR girl (hey, hate the game, not the player).

There would be a substantial minimum order (unless you wanted to pay £100 for a single shirt) and it would take about 3 weeks (picked up from the printers, not delivered).

Which is why German company Spreadshirt seems that much more amazing to me, both a guy-who-likes-tshirts and as a digital planner.

So, first as a guy-who-likes-tshirts. Once signed up, the site sports a very simple web interface where you can create your own products. You pick which shirt (or hoodie / handbag etc) that you want to use as a foundation, then upload a design (or simply type text) to make it your own. You can then sell these designs on your own webshop, choosing your own commission (and therefore the final price to the consumer). There’s no minimum order, so I could use my shop to make one-off designs for me and my friends. Or I could sell my designs on the Spreadshirt Marketplace and try and make a few bob with my designs. Blimmin ace.

It’s experience co-creation meets social media meets crowdsourcing. Spreadshirt also pay users for their user-generated content via advertising displayed each user’s shop, a trend that we’re likely to see more and more of as UGC begins to attract real traffic (and therefore ad revenues). Genius.

Experience co-creation requires consumer involvement in order to create product or service - Spreadshirt provide the basic materials, leaving users to be creative. These created products by their very nature have social currency. If I make a tshirt, I’ll want to tell people about it, as it’s mine and says something about who I am (mine says ‘it would be rude not to’ btw). My friends will visit the shop, maybe buy a tshirt, and probably in turn want to set up a shop to create their own products.

Designs that are popular across the Spreadshirt network are then sold as top picks on the company’s Marketplace. Or users can chose to keep designs private, and create short runs as small as a single tshirt. Quite how they make money is something of a mystery to me, but they seem to be thriving, so something must be right.

So with giants like Nike and adidas offering mass customisation services (Nike Custom and Mi adidas), is this what’s next for apparel? Well, Spreadshirt is more a manufacturing and logistics company than a clothing brand, and it’s unlikely we’ll see a big player surrender all design responsibilities over to the hoi poloi. However for one-off campaigns (like adidas’ adicolor), this could be a way to allow consumers to feel real ownership of the brand.

The Moleskine is reputedly (or is that ‘allegedly’) the notebook of choice for artists and writers, counting Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway among its owners. Of course it’s hard to see the real history of the brand through the slightly smokey marketing but that hasn’t stopped them amassing a loyal and creative fanbase.

I came across this group in Flickr, mainly because one of our painfully talented designers at Saint is a contributor (and definitely one of the best).

http://www.flickr.com/groups/moleskinerie/

Proof that we don’t need to leave old ways of creativity behind in order to share and build communities online - it’s dedicated to beautiful examples of Moleskine notebook pages: sketches, collages, in some cases just delighting in the handwritten word in this era of digital type.

Here’s one of my favourites:

And more here from Rob.